8 ms·
Against the synchronous society
- JoshTriplett 9y agoThere are a few aspects in which society continues to expect synchronicity. For instance, on average, more people wish to be awake when the sun is up, and asleep in the middle of the night, than vice versa. People expect to be able to reach services on the phone, or occasionally go to a shop in person. And, some services can only be provided in-person with both the service provider and customer present. But yes, many things can and should be done in a far more staggered fashion.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoInterestingly, and it's something I don't recall seeing a good explanation for, most services tend to be offered precisely at the same time majority of people are working - thus making them unavailable (or barely available) to the working population. See e.g. barbers, banks, etc.
- dasmoth 9y agoIn a mostly-synchronous society, “standard” working hours become somewhat desirable. Working 9-5ish typically maximises opportunities to see friends and family, and for parents it means they get to take advantage of free government-provided childcare (aka schools). Plenty of places are open outside those hours, but they tend to be shops and services provided by relatively low status workers. Higher-status service workers (dentists, bankers, ...) generally seem to do better at resisting “unsociable” hours. It’s an annoying situation, but can’t see it drastically improving without a widespread move away from synchrony.
- monort 9y agoIt looks as a feature of culture. When there is a demand, no legal obstructions and cultural acceptance, then barbers, banks, shops work late into evening.
- air 9y agoPeople want to maximize the time they spend together with their team mates, spouses, friends and children. That requires synchronization.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThat doesn't automatically imply entire society will keep itself in sync, and yet for some reason it does.
- ajmurmann 9y agoIt might. I want to be at work as the same time as my team mates. My wife wants to be at work as the same time as hers. We both want to be home at the same time. Now my team mates have to be at work as the same time as my wife's... That's not even taking vendors or customers into account we might be doing business with. Schooling for children currently primarily happening with all children in the same room doing the same thing at the same time also furthers this. Just these few examples already cover huge parts of society. I have neither kids, nor did my wife actually have fixed working hours somewhere and yet my job is best done if I work the same hours as all the people who have those constraints. So any one of these can have a huge impact.
- robotresearcher 9y agoIn case the author sees this thread: the time labels for the weekday graph are wrong. The morning peak shows at about 0400, when it should be around 0800. The weekend graph might have the same problem, since it ramps up before 0600, which is unlikely.
- cosmic_ape 9y agoThere is an assumption that most work environments are not like factories anymore. I wonder how true is that, even in "modern" fields such as corporate software development or maybe accounting. It seems these are still overwhelmingly often series of short 2-3 hour tasks that depend on immediate input from others - for task definition, or details needed for implementation. Also, as other comments mention, work is used for socializing. I know many people for whom work today is one of the major forms of social interaction. As a society, we just do not sit on benches in front of the houses, talking to neighbors as they pass by, anymore. That maybe for better of for worse, but it would be good to construct some alternatives, before we remove the synchronous workplace.
- emodendroket 9y agoThe fastest growing sectors are service and healthcare, where I think it actually does matter what time someone is in. The idea that "most" jobs are white-collar office jobs signals to me some lack of awareness on the part of the author here.
- kzrdude 9y agoI'd guess that more now than ever are jobs strictly time or shift scheduled.
- emodendroket 9y agoNot only that: there is a growing trend of requiring workers in low-wage jobs to show up and they'll only find out at the time they show up whether they're needed or just need to go home. Certainly a pretty convenient setup for employers.
- nileshtrivedi 9y agoMarkets have better liquidity when all players are at the same time & place. It's possible that asynchronicity will come at the cost of liquidity - raising transaction costs.
- madsbuch 9y agoThat's a valid concern, but it is solely founded in a capitalistic point of view. For some people there is no more to life than raising their personal net worth, others have other aspects.
- hardlianotion 9y agoI don't think the point is capitalistic - others (above) have made similar points to this one. Many business and social activities are enriched when most participants are present.
- nileshtrivedi 9y agoThis wasn't about money. Markets, in general, refer to exchange of things that we humans value. Since exchange is voluntary, both parties benefit. Liquidity means having someone around to have that exchange with. Economics is much more than simple allocation of money. It's fundamentally about human wants and how to satisfy them.
- starchild_3001 9y agoIntriguing blog post, but the analysis appears overly simplistic. I'm going to go with the assumption with that individuals and private companies are rational. Therefore, they do what's best for them. Then the question becomes why a majority of individuals and private companies pick the synchronized schedule? I believe that should be the angle of investigation, rather than creating theories about the grand mistakes the society makes. Everybody has more or less a brain you know :) And they can choose what's best for them. The question is why does the majority of people and firms choose the synchronized schedule? There can be many reasons. I don't claim to know the answers. We can posit some theories, then test them through reasoning. Number one reason might be: society needs a clock so that families can sync up. Drive kids to work. Help them with their homeworks. Cook. Eat family dinner. Both mom and dad go to work at the same time, so that they can be at home at the same time. You cannot delegate your interactions with your spouse or the kids :) Single people and childless people do have more freedom. I remember the days where I used to go to work between 10-12am. Then leave around 7pm. Many of my single and childless friends are on a similar, shifted schedule. So there you go. You can posit many other theories: E.g. market prices may not be dynamic enough for efficient allocation. That too might have a good reason (dynamic prices incur communication costs & may create confusion). So lack of incentives, too, must be a playing a role. Weekday-weekday synchronicity too must have good reasons. Work gets done a lot better when your colleagues are around, you know :) Remote working hasn't caught up with the quality of face to face interaction. Etc etc. The article misses many obvious things, imo.
- vorotato 9y agoThat's a huge assumption, people frequently pick irrational solutions due to biases. Frequently people value simple solutions over complex ones, even when that complexity is valuable and necessary. I think the best thing we can say about this is "We haven't tried it, and we haven't thought about the ways it could go wrong".
- maxerickson 9y agoWe force children to wake up and go to school at a time that is not best for them. And lots of people have less choice than you imply. They are working the job that they have and work the hours that they get. This is their "rational, best choice", but it isn't likely the one they would make if better options were particularly available.
- apatters 9y agoThis is classic antisocial engineer thinking. The principal benefits of synchronicity are all social: it enables human contact, live conversations and shared context. No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time. We invent bigger and better sewage pipes, some people get paid to build them, and everything's fine. Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones episode at the same time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the office the next day. It really is a minority of people who think otherwise. I run a heavily asynchronous, remote company, with fully remote customers, and mostly remote employees. I bias toward hiring locally just so I have someone to talk to.
- keeganjw 9y agoExactly my thinking. Who care's if Friday is a social construction. It allows people to meet up, talk, and relax before they all have two days off together. How beautiful is that? If people were all working at different times and on different schedules, how would friends and family ever meet up in groups larger than two on any regular basis?
- humanrebar 9y ago> No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time. People care that they sit in two hours of rush hour traffic per day. There is zero synchronicity when you're staring at the license plates in front of you.
- dkersten 9y agoThis is a problem of a car centric society. I’ve been in places where public transport is the norm and travel was a lot easier and more efficient, regardless the time of the day. Yes, obviously during “rush hour”, the public transport would be a lot more full, but often frequency is increased to compensate. (Sure, there’s places where even that isn’t enough and the public transport pipe is congested. We’ve all seen those videos of trains in some places in asia, for example)
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
- xpto123 9y agoYes i agree, synchronicity is environmentally unsustainable. Metro stations and train stations are designed for peak capacity in rush hour. Office workers spend the vast part of the day at their workstation and sending emails. Why not do that from home? Most meetings are useless and we know it, why not do them in chat or video conference? Open spaces are the worst possible environment to get anything done and everyone knows it. But there is this mindset that in person presence is the only way to work and interact, Which is true for some professions, but not all of them. Most people dream would love working from home.
- emodendroket 9y agoOn the other hand, many commuter systems run at a much lower frequency outside of peak hours. It seems like having them running at the same frequency day-round would not necessarily be a win in the environmental impact department. If that is your concern trains should be as close to capacity as possible at all times.
- emodendroket 9y ago> In the case of the Underground network, there are times on some lines where trains arrive more frequently than every two minutes (pretty much as often as they can, given that the trains have to maintain a safe distance between each other and spend some time on the platform) and yet they still are packed between 8am and 9am. Any incident, however small, like someone holding up the doors, can result in a knock-on effect, delaying the whole line massively. > Why are people doing this to themselves? It is not as though they have any choice in the matter. However, if you've ever worked a job with irregular weekends you'll know that one thing that stinks about it is you can rarely coordinate stuff with friends and family on your days off. Also hard to do stuff like attend church.
- michaelfeathers 9y agoI haven't read the full article but my immediate criticism is that systems need the spikes and peaks that synchrony provides. If they didn't exist we'd have to simulate them to keep systems from being overly fragile. Yes, there's a power spike when everyone goes to the fridge during a commercial, but the need to handle that variation makes systems more robust.
- michaelfeathers 9y agoI'd like to hear a criticism of this.
- Wildgoose 9y agoI agree - I thought you were making a valid point.
- meuk 9y agoThere are way more inefficiencies in our society. For example, we require an academic degree which requires a huge amount of effort (time/money) for many non-academic jobs. Exactly those things that are scarse are seen as a status symbol, which makes it very hard to live sustainably (this applies to diet, transport, housing, travel, ...). It would be way more efficient to let people bring a container to the supermarket and fill it with the exact amount of stuff that they need. Instead, producers use disposable containers because they can add advertisements on it. I could go on for way longer (but a HN post is probably not a good format).
- gumby 9y agoDepending on your job you can hack the holiday mechanism to your advantage. We were immigrants and little reason to care about the US holidays Thanksgiving and Independence Day. My mum, a physician always offered to cover those days and every other doctor in the (small) hospital took her up on it. Which meant whenever she wanted someone to be on call for her, she always had a huge number of people who owed her a favor. This hack worked for Christmas too even though we did celebrate it (though just pressies and a meal — no family on the continent): people don’t like to get sick at Xmas so she never got called before the end of the day (and as a bonus she left us with all the washing up)
- skybrian 9y agoI would make a different argument about over-provisioning. Using infrastructure at maximum capacity means there's less of a safety margin and it's often unpleasant due to traffic or crowding. Reducing capacity in the name of efficiency doesn't seem like a good thing. Instead I'd argue that using infrastructure at maximum capacity isn't something we necessarily need to do ten times a week. It needs to be tested, but maybe not that often?
- jdblair 9y agoWhat if I want to play recreational soccer or attend church services in fellowship with a few hundred fellow believers? This proposal completely discounts a whole range of non-work mass activities.
- theoh 9y agoHmmm, maybe file with art critic Mike Pepi's "Asynchronous! On the sublime administration of the everyday" http://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59798/asynchronous-on-the-sublime-administration-of-the-everyday/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59798/asynchronous-on-the-s...